Crying Wolf Threatens Real Victims

Courts Often Skeptical Of Recanted Testimony

When a 52-year-old Oak Park woman reported last February that she had been abducted, robbed and raped, she was, in the words of one police detective, "very convincing."

Eight Oak Park detectives worked around the clock for a day and a half. They followed the woman's scraps of information to a suspect--only to learn that she had made up the whole story.

The only person convicted in the case was the woman. She pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false police report, received a year's court supervision and was ordered to pay $900 as reimbursement for the overtime that police had put in chasing her allegations.

The Texas case in which a woman now stands charged with falsely accusing Dallas Cowboys Michael Irvin and Erik Williams of rape is the latest example of a supposed victim allegedly offering fiction as fact.

Authorities have filed a misdemeanor perjury charge against the woman, who police say admitted lying.

That case and others like it worry authorities largely because of the threat they pose to real victims and the criminal justice system.

"If you cry wolf enough times, eventually the wolves win," said Thomas Epach Jr., chief of criminal prosecutions for the Cook County state's attorney's office. "It slowly diminishes the belief systems of everybody--of all future jurors, of all future judges."

Such false accusations also threaten to resurrect the legal system's historic view that women have a propensity to lie about sexual encounters. In decades past, legal scholars urged all-too-agreeable courts to treat women's allegations with extreme caution, arguing the accusations could be a cover for sexual promiscuity or a way to exact revenge. National statistics, however, indicate such false accusations are very much the exception.

The temptation is to view the Dallas case and others like it as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, what with the explosion of media scrutiny and celebrity obsession.

But tales of false accusations date to the Bible and Potiphar's wife, who cried rape after a slave, Joseph the Israelite, rejected her sexual advances.

The Dallas case is yet another bizarre tale of bogus allegations involving the sports world.

In 1980, University of Missouri basketball player Steve Stipanovich told police that an intruder had shot him in the arm. In fact, Stipanovich had accidentally shot himself. And in 1992, Miami Dolphins football player Alfred Oglesby told police that he had been kidnapped and abandoned in the Everglades.

In fact, Oglesby had overslept and wanted to avoid punishment for breaking curfew and missing practice.

In the Dallas case, Irvin and Williams were never charged, but the publicity made them victims nonetheless. The same was true with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin four years ago. He never was charged in connection with a man's claim--later recanted--that Bernardin had sexually molested him, but Bernardin still suffered public humiliation.

Authorities say the Oak Park and Dallas cases are unusual in that charges were filed against the accuser. Usually, after spending hours trying to solve a crime that never happened, the last thing police want to do is spend yet more time assembling a case against the accuser.

Authorities say charges are more likely to be filed when the false accusation results in significant harm to the accused. In the Oak Park case, a man was arrested and later released. In the Dallas case, the two players had the accusations against them replayed endlessly in the media.

The greatest tragedy occurs when a false accusation works its way through the court system and results in a finding of guilt. Courts have struggled with what to do when a supposed victim recants after a conviction. But almost without exception, courts have eyeballed such recantations with great skepticism.

Early this century, a court in a New York murder case went so far as to write that "there is no form of proof so unreliable" as recanted testimony. Many judges continue to hold that view today.

The courts view recantations with such suspicion that lawyers face an uphill battle trying to reopen a case when a supposed victim recants. Even when Cathleen Crowell Webb said her allegations of being raped in Homewood by Gary Dotson were a lie, a judge refused to believe her and give Dotson a new trial. Dotson's sentence was later commuted by Gov. Jim Thompson.

Naperville lawyer Kathleen Zellner realized how difficult it could be to make a court believe recanted testimony when she represented Illinois Death Row inmate Joseph Burrows. Burrows was convicted mostly on the testimony of Gayle Potter, who had committed the murder herself.

She fabricated the involvement of Burrows because she believed he had burglarized her trailer home.

After Potter and Burrows were convicted of murder, Zellner visited Potter in prison about three dozen times, trying to persuade her to tell the truth.

Eventually, Potter provided a full confession, and Burrows won his release.

The episode helped convince Zellner that courts should keep more of an open mind when witnesses change their tune.

"I don't think we should assume they're lying when they recant," Zellner said. "And that's what the law assumes."